About the Workshop

The idea for this workshop was first developed through the “Underground Educators of Myanmar and What We Can Learn From Them,” workshop at IIAS in June 2023, and will have 21 participants from Myanmar and Thailand meet with the facilitating HAB researchers from Northern Illinois University (NIU), Leiden University College (LUC), and Aberyswyth University at the Regional Center for Social Science (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University.

Over the course of the four day workshop, trainees will engage in a variety of activities that explore the story of Chiang Mai and the personal stories of the trainees themselves, supported by lectures throughout that outlined the theories around educational storytelling. Activities include individual and group-oriented tasks, such as telling the story of their preferred name and using that story to explain the arc of storytelling, taking a tour of the RCSD and telling a story about their walking trip through sensory mediums (sights, sounds, smells, etc.), conducting interviews with their facilitators and converting them into stories about a place and its student/teacher, among other things. 

By encouraging the trainees to narrate stories about events and places familiar to them & and their community, they will have the chance to experience how stories can act as contemporary historical records, as well as a representation of the importance of the local community in student learning. 

Workshop Schedule 

Day 1. 28th November (RCSD): Introduce storytelling as process and place-based learning as a source of stories
Day 2. 29th November (RCSD): Active listening, interview skills and oral history.
Day 3. 30th November (Payap AM, RCSD PM): Use storyboarding - assemble the story using frames to mark different stages of a story
Day 4. 1st Dec (RCSD). What can we do with ‘storytelling’ and Place-based education?

For more details, check out the workshop program in the Attachments section, as well as "Sharing Stories That Matter: Reflecting on Myanmar Underground Educators".